The personal blog of Peter Lee a.k.a. "China Hand"... Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel, and an open book to those who read. You are welcome to contact China Matters at the address chinamatters --a-- prlee.org or follow me on twitter @chinahand.

Monday, July 08, 2013

The Devil and Daniel Ellsberg

In my most recent piece for Asia Times Online, I discussed calls for Edward Snowden to “do an Ellsberg” i.e. demonstrate his
patriotic lovingkindness by surrendering to US authorities.

In his memoir Secrets,
Ellsberg details the dirty tricks projects the Nixon administration initiated against him
and speculates their purpose was to blackmail him into shutting up, or drive
him into exile or even suicide.

Ellsberg writes, “I feel sure, knowing myself at that time,
that nothing could have induced me to do any of those things.” (pg. 443)

Nevertheless, as the ATOl piece points out, Ellsberg feels
that Snowden is in a different situation:

But meanwhile, the
treatment of him, and the pronouncements by everybody here, like - I'm talking
about Snowden now - have convinced Snowden, and I think very realistically,
that if he wanted to be able to tell the public what he had done and why he had
done it and what his motives were and what the patterns of criminality were in
the material that he was releasing, it had to be outside the United States.
Otherwise he would be in perhaps the same cell that Bradley Manning was, and
that's a military cell.

Ellsberg returned to this issue on July 7 in an opinion piece for the Washington Post.He
pointed out that he had, like Snowden, gone into hiding and accepted fugitive
status in order to complete his distribution of the Pentagon Papers before
surrendering.

Ellsberg also noted that while under indictment he was able
to stay out of jail for two years to agitate for the end of the Vietnam War and,
in the process, make the case for himself in the court of public opinion, on
the strength of a less than backbreaking $50,000 bond—a luxury that Edward
Snowden would be unlikely to enjoy:

I hope Snowden’s
revelations will spark a movement to rescue our democracy, but he could not be
part of that movement had he stayed here. There is zero chance that he would be
allowed out on bail if he returned now and close to no chance that, had he not
left the country, he would have been granted bail. Instead, he would be in a
prison cell like Bradley Manning, incommunicado.

Secrets also describes
Ellsberg’s spiritual journey from parfait knight of the US foreign policy round
table to anguished and increasingly indignant whistleblower.His privileged access to the government,
think tank, and media elites is worlds away from Edward Snowden and his
anonymous grubbing in the data mines of the post-9/11 security state.

While working on the Nixon transition in late 1968, Henry
Kissinger asked RAND to review the Vietnam situation.RAND nominates Daniel Ellsberg:

Kissinger approved,
though with one reservation…Kissinger was happy to have me do the study, but he
had one worry about me, my “discretion.”

I was astonished…My
whole career was based on a well-founded trust in my discretion. (Secrets, pg. 230).

A few pages later, Ellsberg completes a document framing the
crucial Vietnam issues for comment by the various US executive branch
stakeholders; it is circulated as “NSSM-1” i.e. National Security Study
Memorandum 1, the first document of its series put out by Nixon’s National
Security Administration.The various
stakeholders provide 500 pages of extremely revealing responses.

Fast forward to pg. 241-2:

[Mort Halperin, the
DoD staffer responsible for assembling the Pentagon Papers] took me aside…one
morning and said, “I’m going to ask you not to show any of this material to
anybody at Rand or take any copies back with you.”…I took it for granted from
Mort’s unemphatic, pro forma tone that what he meant was simply to go on record
as telling me not to do this, thereby signaling that it should not get back to
the White House that Rand had his material…if Mort had really been serious
about keeping me from sending this back to Rand, he could have conveyed that
very reliably…

So having registered
Mort’s warning and agreeing with him, I took care to copy all the documents
myself in the copying alcove of the NSCD, rather than hand them to a secretary
to copy, as I would otherwise have done.When I took them back to Rand, I convened a rather large meeting…Having
made and passed out a number of copies, I repeated the warning that Halperin
had given to me…I said that this was presumably so he could disclaim
responsibility…

“Discrete” indeed.Not
to worry:

…Some months later…I
asked [Halperin] if I had been right…Halperin said, “Of course.”

In Daniel Ellsberg’s estimation his leak of the Pentagon
Papers in 1971 did little, if anything to end the Vietnam War as conducted by
Richard Nixon.The U.S. war only ended
because of Nixon’s downfall soon after his re-election in 1972, thanks to the antics
of his plumbers, the team of extra-legal leak-plugging zealots that Nixon’s
coterie unleashed on his enemies.

The wonderful, ironic element is the role of Henry Kissinger—and
Daniel Ellsberg--in Nixon’s fall.

According to Ellsberg, Kissinger had a low opinion of Nixon;
on the occasion of RMN’s election, he told an audience at MIT that Nixon was
“not fit to be president”.That was not
the Kissinger line once Nixon appointed him as his National Security Advisor, but
one can speculate that Kissinger’s doubts precluded a comfortable atmosphere of
trust and understanding between Nixon and his national security Richelieu.

Nixon was not too disturbed by the leak of the Pentagon
Papers at first.

The Papers concluded their narrative with the Johnson
administration and painted a pleasing picture of Democratic duplicity and
cluelessness under Kennedy and LBJ.

Nixon, eager to undercut the stature of Edward Kennedy, his
expected Democratic challenger in the next election, instructed his minions to
push out the Pentagon Papers story of the US role in the deposition and
liquidation of South Vietnam’s President Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963.

Diem, in addition to being an incapable president, was also
an ardent Catholic who lived a virtually cloistered existence.Nixon felt that highlighting Kennedy betrayal
of a fellow Catholic would weaken Edward Kennedy’s appeal to his core religious
base.

Doubt and anxiety pervaded Nixon’s mind, however, when a key
document from his own administration, NSSM-1 , the memorandum referenced above,
made its way into the hands of a Senatorial critic, Mark Mathias, and Mathias
revealed some of its pessimistic conclusions.

The prospect of a leak in his own national security
apparatus appalled Nixon, because he had hid the details of the secret bombing
of Cambodia even from his own secretaries of state (William Smith) and defense
(Melvin Laird).

The irony is that NSSM-1 leaked, not because the current
denizens of the Nixon White House couldn’t keep a secret, but because Daniel
Ellsberg had copied the document while he was working for Henry Kissinger.

Kissinger, the dissembling courtier (or, if you prefer, the terrified
capo secretly writhing before Nixon’s Don Corleone) dared not short circuit the
leak investigation by admitting that he had nourished the Ellsberg viper in the
bosom of the new administration:

…there was no
awareness throughout that period that what I had given Mathias was (simply)
NSSM-1.Moreover, it’s clear from
numerous taped discussions that Kissinger never did reveal to Nixon the
embarrassing information that I had worked directly for him in February and
March of 1969…Since no one knew both those pieces of data, [Attorney General
John] Mitchell’s conclusion…that there must be a conspiracy was inescapable…[Secrets,
pg. 435]

And so the operation to find the anti-war movement’s non-existent
co-conspirators inside Nixon’s NSC—the march of folly of the plumbers who
blundered through the Watergate operation and eventually brought down the Ellsberg
case and the Nixon presidency—was born.

I am really appreciate this wonderful write my essay paper for me post that you have provided for us. I assure this would be beneficial for most of the people. Your post is most good looking and so nice.